Évaluation publiée le 27 novembre 2019
Produit reçu gratuitement
Disclosure: I got this game for free from a friend who had some Humble keys to dump. I feel bad about thumbing it down for that reason; I've heard developers get a lot of thumbs-downs from Humble buyers who wouldn't have bought the game normally and only got it because it happened to be available for three cents. However, this is a puzzle game I've been eyeing for a little bit, and it seems like it was right up my alley.
Ok, first I want to talk about the big mechanical issues.
* For some inexplicable reason, EVERY action in the game has a long cooldown associated with it while you wait for a color-fade animation to happen on your hands or a sound effect to finish or whatever. EVERYTHING. absolutely EVERYTHING has a cooldown. Most individual buttons and switches have a cooldown and there is also a (separate, slow) maximum clicking rate. Clicking on something while it's on cooldown doesn't buffer the input, it just eats your click with no indication. This is *infuriating*, especially when many of the physics puzzles require clicking at a precise time, or when you want to execute a solution quickly because you figured it out. It basically feels like your mouse button is broken and flaky.
* For a game focused around physics puzzles you'd expect the physics system to be solid - it's really not, there are many situations where you can glitch into a moving floor or wall (I nearly trapped myself once), and I can't even count how many times I've tried to push a block with another block and they just intersected each other instead.
* The game is entirely linear with a few branches-off for secrets. Nothing wrong with that. But the voiceover, especially the foil character, is constantly asking you to Escape and Do Something and Believe and you can't do any of that because there is nowhere else to go.
* There's a big focus on looking for secrets hidden in the walls. But there's also invisible walls around every corner! Do you want me to explore or not, game? D:
* No subtitles, not even in English, the voiceover language.
* No colorblind mode (I am not colorblind, but this game is EXTREMELY unfriendly to all forms of colorblindness)
Puzzle issues:
* The puzzles, for the most part, just aren't that interesting. Most are super super easy. I finished the game in two hours.
* There are a lot of very linear puzzles where there's not many choices you can make, you just look for the one thing you can do and do that.
* They do sometimes throw in a hard puzzle, but it's usually sandwiched between two easy ones (making you think there's something you missed), or the cooldowns and broken physics make a disconnect between *solving* the puzzle and actually *performing the solution*.
* Or, the hard puzzle is some barely-enjoyable physics nightmare - one is helpfully labeled "the hardest puzzle in the game"? It's not even that hard, it's just jank as hell.
* Physics puzzles sometimes require clicking at a precise time to extend a block to hit a ball or something, but pretty much everything in the game has a short delay before it's able to do something actionable to the ball (blocks take a bit to extend, rotating segments take a bit to significantly rotate, magnets are "floaty" and take a while to start pulling at top speed). This, combined with the COOLDOWNS on EVERY INTERACTION (I can not stress this enough) make physics puzzles very frustrating. And most of the puzzles are physics puzzles.
* Darkness is not a puzzle element, for god's sake!!! Fortunately that section is over quickly.
* My favorite element, lasers and mirrors, are introduced for a bit, then given a crappy final puzzle (the "hardest puzzle") and then dropped entirely.
* Magnet switches (my other favorite element) are introduced and then dropped.
* There's these really cool robot-mine things that wander around and rotate when they hit a wall. Also introduced, given a few mildly interesting puzzles, and... dropped.
* Cables are introduced, and - you guessed it - dropped!
* Or, in other words, this is one of those games that keeps introducing new test elements to cover for the lack of depth in the existing ones. (If you compare it to a puzzle game like The Talos Principle, which has like six or seven distinct test elements and makes an entire game out of them an *order of magnitude* of the length of QUBE... you can see what I mean, right?)
The good things:
* No platforming sections! :D Being a puzzle platformer, of course there is some jumping involved. But the jumping is not hard, platforms are large and decently easy to hit, and the more involved jumps usually have some type of catapult to line you up. There's certainly no annoying sections where you need to time a jump onto a moving platform, or sections where failing a jump means you die or have to spend a bunch of time walking back up, or whatever. SoooooOOOOOOOOO many games do this and it's infuriating. QUBE does not fall into this trap.
* There is, as far as I can tell, no way to die. This is *great* and more puzzle games should aspire to this.
* Some of the magnet puzzles in particular do this interesting thing where opening the door is one thing, but figuring out how to reach it is another, more involved thing. I really liked those puzzles, those were a lot of fun. The puzzle with the two green cubes, two red extendy bits, and two magnets was very very cool.
* I really want to stress that the handful of good puzzles this game has are actually quite good, especially the more advanced laser-redirection puzzles and the final puzzle. (Hampered by everything else, of course, but the seed of an idea is there.)
* The story isn't super stellar, but it's a puzzle game, who cares lmao.
Wtf?:
* For god knows what reason there's also a time-trial mode that takes place on a whole new set of specially constructed arena maps. You know, in case you took a look at the janky physics and long cooldowns and thought "You know, what this is missing is some time pressure and some sniper aiming". I don't know why you'd want to play this.